The Ixus 60 delivers superb image quality and is beautifully designed and built.

With huge LCDs, underwater capabilities and high resolutions for under $450, now is the time to buy.

Canon's reign over the compact digital camera market looks set to continue with this offering.

If the Ixus i were any smaller it would be plain inconvenient to use. Weighing just over 100g, it’s certainly a camera you can keep with you all the time. As you’d expect at this size and price, there are limitations, the most obvious being the fixed focal length lens, but there’s plenty else to be thankful for.

A beautiful example of high technology, but we have reservations about the ultimate quality of images.

Cheap, sexy, slim and fully-featured. A dream for ultra-portable photography.

Anyone who used the IXUS 40 mightwonder how Canon could possiblyimprove on it, but that’s precisely whatit has done.

A sexy magnesium-alloy housing gives the IXUS 400 one of the most compact camera bodies submitted this month. The bright 118,000-pixel LCD gives an excellent preview of your images or for shot placement when not using the viewfinder.

Battery life is the only downside to this excellent compact camera.

Once the lens shutters are opened, the Canon PowerShot S50 powers up and welcomes you with a tone. Similar to the smaller Canon IXUS 400 in terms of features, it too ships with a 32MB CF card and AV cables. With fairly easy to navigate menus, the S50 also features video capture and a thumb-sliding preview mode.

It’s the stills camera that thinks it’s a video camera. A high definition video camera.

With its slim dimensions, the FinePix F700 is almost the odd one out in this test. It’s certainly no IXUS, but the F700 will still fit into your pocket and the brushed metal casing looks the part. But the main reason the F700 costs more than the bigger S5000 is because of the new Super CCD SR. Instead of one photodiode per pixel, this fourth-generation CCD has two: a high-sensitivity one for shadows and mid-tones, and a low-sensitivity one for highlights. Fujifilm claims this gives a greater dynamic range, aiding tricky lighting situations by capturing shadow detail without bleaching out highlights.

An expensive and unusually poor Sony product.

In marketing terms, bigger is better, leadingHP to use a 6.2-megapixel CCD in the newR717. That sounds superior to its predecessor,the R707, but pixel count is largely academicover 4 megapixels unless you want A3 size.

Easy to use and capable of good results, the superb range of manual modes makes this a good choice for enthusiasts.

A very slim digital compact that’s capable of taking superb pictures. It only just misses out on a Recommended award.

Taking great photos in most situations, the DSC-W50 is a bargain at this price.

The first thing you notice about the Kyocera Samurai 2100DG is the shape of the camera.

In issue 119 of PC Authority, we took eighteen cameras and put their images under the microscope. Now you can too.

An attractive, light and well-built camera, but it has average image quality.